Request 048 — 2/17/2026

Rumor? It’s true. It’s on the Wikipedia.

It’s Tuesday, happy foiaday!

It has been like the longest of long, marathon medical appointment days: long waits, long holds with insurance, (blissfully short) bloodwork, long drives, x-rays, MRIs. Eyuck.

But it’s foiaday now, and it’s time for some requests!!!! Let’s talk public records!! Let’s go: Wikipedia emails!

If there's a coworker or friend you think would benefit from this newsletter, feel free to forward it to them! If they subscribe, they'll also get a link to a template for the tracker I like to use to keep tabs on requests I've filed.

One of my favorite 2010s-era political scandals is, without a doubt, Congressional Wikipedia editing.

I’m not going to rehash the storied history of @CongressEdits or the entire scandal — there’s Wikipedia articles, and normal articles, about that! — but I will share some high-level notes here:

1. People were caught editing Wikipedia with IP addresses stemming from Congress and D.C.

2. The articles they were editing were of politicians that they possibly worked for

3. That’s not allowed!!!1!1!111!!!

As a longtime Wikipedia editor myself (dare you to find my talk page, it’s unfortunately pretty out there!), I’m very familiar with everything under the verboten sun: sockpuppettry, IP spoofing, conflict-of-interest-editing, peacocking and more.

But. Nevertheless, edits persisted.

I feel like Congressional edits have died down _{(and maybe that’s a great story idea or project that I threw out there that someone would want to collaborate on, hit me up, please let me write about Wikipedia!)}, but here’s the rub. Wikipedia has two different classes of editors: IP users (now called “TA users,” because Wikipedia changed the practice of exposing a user’s IP address, unfortunately IMO), and registered users. Registered users are the ones with an actual username, who, you guessed it, registered on the site.

When you’re a registered user, you get notifications to/from “wiki@wikimedia.org“, which is their standard sort of no-reply email inbox. This includes any notifications (like about talk page edits, password resets and possible barnstars you were awarded!), and it also is the main point of contact for your account, including the user name you may have registered with, and the IP address you had been editing from.

You can see where I’m maybe going with this.

Let’s request emails from wiki@wikimedia.org, then, from a bunch of press offices. Maybe, like, all of them? (Just kidding.) We’ll grab them from some big local offices (Governor, Mayor, etc) and then from some federal ones; I’ll do some we’ve requested from before, and some that are new.

And, just for fun, I’ll keep it a secret which offices I’m requesting from, for now. 😉

So:

- All emails received from "wiki@wikimedia.org" to [user/list of users] at [agency] between 1/1/2010 and present (2/17/2026 or whenever this request is processed). Please release documents in a .pdf format if possible. If more than five hundred emails are found by the search, please release a log of emails including the to/from/cc/bcc fields, the date sent, the subject line and any possible attachments.

I’m really excited to get some of these records back, and I’ve been fielding some clarification and dispute-adjacent emails over the past week or so. Through all of these requests, I’ve offered to get on the phone a bunch of times, but have only ever talked to, like, two FOIA officers on the phone. Hopefully that changes and I can gab and get some hot FOIA goss.

But, ICYMI, yesterday, I published our week seven roundup, which followed a mega-email with a bunch of requests in detail.

Okie dokie. After being a human pincushion all day, and then when getting home, a doggy launch pad for zoomies, I am eager to schedule this, get to bed, and stalk my MyChart tomorrow. (FOIA newsletter writers: they’re just like us!)

All the best! Take care! Happy filing!

Cam